Graphic Communication
Graphic communication is focused on the industry of tomorrow, taught by practicing designers ready to share their knowledge. If you are passionate about forming clever pieces of visual communication and using innovative digital tools to produce impacting artwork, then this course is for you.
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Key Course Details
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UCAS Code
W212
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Start Date
September
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Location
Cardiff
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Campus Code
B
Fees
Home students
£9,535*
International students
£15,850*
- Full-time fees are per year. Part-time fees are per 20 credits.
Be inspired by the world of graphic design and learn to think and practice like a creative designer with this industry-facing degree course.
DESIGNED FOR
Our course is designed for students inspired by Graphic Design practices and the different ways of intelligently solving design challenges and communicating ideas. This highly diverse course will get you solving design briefs set by design agencies to develop your creative confidence and professionalism.
Career Paths
- Graphic designer
- UX/UI designer
- Motion graphics designer
- Brand strategist
- Campaign and marketing
- Creative director
In collaboration with
- The BBC
- The Royal Mint
- Gwent Police
- Welsh Water
- Design Dough
- Rant
- Toward
- Bluestag
- Spindogs
- Limegreen tangerine
- Martin Hopkins
- CREO
- Icon Creative
- Jam Creative
- DO Digital
- Waters Creative
- The Office for National Statistics
Skills taught
- Design thinking
- Creative problem solving
- Design Research Methodologies
- Creativity and art direction
- Digital production skills
- User Centered design
- Project and time management skills
- Teamwork and collaboration
Course Highlights
Module Overview
You’ll analyse, synthesise, and create, learning contemporary approaches to design for various projects and a wide variety of challenges throughout your course. You’ll develop links with industry professionals and develop your portfolio for a future in graphic communication.
Year One
Graphic Design Principles
Design Thinking
Design Revolutions
Infographics
Social Design
Typography
Year Two
Branding
Motion Graphics
Professional Practice and Entrepreneurship
Design Research Methods
User Experience (UX) Design
Digital Design in Practice
Year Three
Bootcamp for Creative Industries
Design Futures
Design Competitions
Final Research Project
Final Major Project
Your first year will cover design principles, design thinking, and exploring revolutionary moments in Design history. You’ll experience many practical challenges.
Graphic Design Principles
Start the course with a series of exciting workshops to develop a practical knowledge of how commercial designers use principles to design effective visual communication.
Design Thinking
Encourage your curiosity and understanding of the design thinking process as you apply design methods and techniques to solve practical design challenges.
Design Revolutions
Explore how graphic design evolved throughout history in an exciting research-based module that will provide you with a key understanding of historic moments within graphic design.
Infographics
Learn how to communicate complex messages with data and understand how information graphics can encourage behaviour change and inform public perceptions.
Social Design
Discover how design can influence people's behaviour through campaigns and awareness. You’ll learn how design can be used for positive social change through a practical project.
Typography
Experiment with typography as an essential component of visual communication and develop your love and creative confidence with type as both artform and clerical information.
You’ll practice specialisms including branding, motion graphics, UX & digital design. You’ll explore design agencies, entrepreneurship and develop your understanding of human-centered design research
Branding
Learn how to understand and then visually represent a company’s vision, values, behaviour, attitude, products, services, and audience through Graphic design.
Motion Graphics
From movie title sequences, game interfaces to moving-brands, an understanding of motion graphics provides a critical component in the modern-day designers' toolkit.
Professional Practice and Entrepreneurship
Gain valuable exposure to the business of design as you learn what it takes to run your own agency. You’ll learn to recognise the needs of businesses and organisations.
Design Research Methods
Learn how to use design research to better understand human behaviour, recognise people's needs and gain insights to create meaningful design solutions that people value.
User Experience (UX) Design
Explore the emerging field of UX Design, adopting a user-centred approach to learn how to better design for both digital and physical spaces.
Digital Design in Practice
Dive into the world of digital design in practice, where you’ll learn to work in digital teams using digital technologies such as photography, animation, 2D and 3D design.
You’ll develop your professionalism, portfolio and explore self-directed design briefs that prepare you for your future career. You’ll exhibit work in an industry-facing graduate showcase
Bootcamp for Creative Industries
Gain the skills you’ll need to enjoy a career in design with our creative boot camp. You’ll take part in a series of timed briefs delivered by a variety of industry professionals.
Design Futures
Create a professional brand identity and curate your creative portfolio based on interactions and research of what design agencies are looking for in future designers.
Design Competitions
‘Think Big’ and develop your best ideas to provide creative solutions to some of the world’s biggest design challenges. Experience a design brief from local, national and international agencies.
Final Research Project
Investigate a design topic of your own choice to discover new design challenges. Design and publish your results in your own research document.
Final Major Project
This is your opportunity to work on your own self-directed design brief and push your design skills to show your skills for future prospective employers.
Course Highlights
Delivery and assessment
Led largely by practical workshops, projects and guest lectures, our Graphic Communication course has been designed to encourage curiosity, creativity and innovation. Students can expect to receive exciting design challenges (design briefs) through the broad-based wide variety of diverse modules that populate this course. You’ll collaborate, explore and research topics that interest you and develop a portfolio of work that will support your future career aspirations in graphic design.
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Teaching staff
You’ll be taught by graphic design lecturers that are extremely passionate about this subject area, all are experienced in a wide range of disciplines and commercial industries with an extensive network of professionals that influence the course curriculum.
As the course is largely practical, you’ll work on real-life briefs set by design agencies throughout your time studying. You’ll also get to attend guest lecturers from designers across the field and have the opportunity to arrange a mentor to help nurture and encourage your creativity.
You’ll be encouraged to attend cross-faculty events where speakers from other specialist areas share their expertise. This will help you build a network of connections within the creative industry that will prove invaluable to you and your future career.
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Placements and work experience
On this hands-on course, you’ll be encouraged to secure placements that interest you, whether that’s with a local agency in Cardiff, a national brand or charity or even an organisation such as the BBC or Gwent Police.
Many of our design students pick up freelance opportunities and industry placements alongside the course through exposure to clients, industry practitioners and design agencies within our professional network.
There are no limits to our design students gaining experience in all kinds of institutions and students have enjoyed working at a range of places like the agency Martin Hopkins, Bright Collie and the BBC.
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Facilities
Positioned in the heart of Cardiff, you’ll have direct access to on campus specialist facilities including Green Screen Capture Studio, 3D Printing facilities, laser cutting machines, photography studios and printers. Our design studios are equipped with the latest Macs with Apple Silicon, specialist software (Adobe Creative Cloud, Cinema 4D and Figma), as well as Wacom Graphics Tablets to help support you.
We can also offer specialist equipment such as DSLR cameras, Macbooks, iPads, camera lenses and lighting kits which can be borrowed through our loan services. The library also offers a great range of design books, magazines, and journals.
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ENTRY REQUIREMENTS
96 UCAS Points (or above)
Typical qualification requirements:
- A Level: CCC to include a relevant art and design subject
- Welsh BACC: Pass the Advanced Welsh Baccalaureate Diploma with Grade C in the Skills Challenge Certificate and CC at A Level with a relevant art and design subject
- BTEC: BTEC Extended Diploma Merit Merit Merit in a relevant subject
- Access to HE: Pass the Access to HE Diploma with a minimum of 96 UCAS tariff points
Additional requirements include:
GCSEs: The University normally requires a minimum 5 GCSEs including Mathematics/Numeracy and English at Grade C or Grade 4 or above, or their equivalent, but consideration is given to individual circumstances
International applications welcomed:
We welcome international applications with equivalent qualifications of our entry requirements. For more details related to your country of residence, please view our dedicated country pages.
English language requirements
International applicants will need to have achieved an overall of IELTS 6.0 with a minimum of 5.5 in each component/TOEFL 72 overall and a minimum of 18 in reading, 17 in listening, 20 in speaking and 17 in writing or equivalent.
Equivalents can be located on our English Language pages.
If you have previously studied through the medium of English, IELTS might not be required, please visit our country specific page for further details. If your country is not featured, please contact us.
If you do not meet the English entry criteria, please visit our Pre-Sessional course pages.
Contextual offers
We may make you a lower offer based on a range of factors, including your background (where you live and the school or college that you attended, for example), your experiences and individual circumstances (as a care leaver, for example). This is referred to as a contextual offer, and we receive data from UCAS to support us in making these decisions.
USW prides itself on its student experience and we support our students to achieve their goals and become a successful graduate. This approach helps us to support students who have the potential to succeed and who may have faced barriers that make it more difficult to access university.
We're here to help
Whether you a have a question about your course, fees and funding, the application process or anything else, there are plenty of ways you can get in touch, and we'd love to talk to you. You can contact our friendly admissions team by phone, email or chat to us online.
Fees and Funding
£9,535
per year*£15,850
per year*Additional Costs
As a student of USW, you’ll have access to lots of free resources to support your study and learning, such as textbooks, publications, online journals, laptops, and plenty of remote-access resources. Whilst in most cases these resources are more than sufficient in supporting you with completing your course, additional costs, both obligatory and optional, may be required or requested for the likes of travel, memberships, experience days, stationery, printing, or equipment.
* Obligatory
Students are required to purchase sketchbooks to document their design process whilst undertaking practical assignments. Students may also choose to purchase additional specialist stationery or materials such as render pens, technical pencils and shape stencils to support their practice. The library has a range of design books to support student learning, but students may wish to purchase their own private copy. Costs are subject to individual requirements.
Cost: Up to £250
Students may be required to print designed outcomes for specific modules for live briefs, client presentations and assessment. Costs are subject to individual requirements.
Cost: Up to £300
Students commonly purchase digital devices relevant to their practice. These may include one or several Apple iMacs, MacBook Pros, iPad Pros, PCs, PC Laptops, or DSLR Cameras. Costs are subject to individual requirements. Equipment is additionally available for loan via the university's services.
Cost: £400-£1600
Students commonly purchase additional digital peripherals such as Wacom Graphic Tablets, Apple Magic Mouse (or other brand), Apple Pencil (or other brand), External or Cloud-based storage and External Monitors. Costs subject to individual requirements. Equipment is additionally available for loan via the university's services.
Field trip to international destination
Cost: £900-£1200
Media Loans
You can hire a range of equipment, for your assignments and practical work, for free from our Media Loans facility.
Media LoansUniversity Quality Assurance
At USW, we regularly review our courses in response to changing patterns of employment and skills demand to ensure we offer learning designed to reflect today’s student needs and tomorrow’s employer demands.
If during a review process course content is significantly changed, we’ll write to inform you and talk you through the changes for the coming year. But whatever the outcome, we aim to equip our students with the skillset and the mindset to succeed whatever tomorrow may bring. Your future, future-proofed.
Top ten in UK for assessment in Graphic Design (Guardian University Guide 2024).
Top in Wales for teaching and assessment in Graphic Design (Guardian University Guide 2024).
How to apply
All applications for full-time undergraduate courses or foundation degrees should be made via UCAS. Take the next step: Apply through UCAS. You can apply to us directly for all part-time undergraduate courses, if you’re seeking advanced entry or you’re an international student. To apply directly, please choose the application form below for your preferred start date and mode of study (full-time or part-time.)
Advanced entry
If you already have a relevant qualification or experience related to the course you're applying for, you may be eligible to start at a later stage of the course. For example, students from partner colleges can ‘top up’ their qualifications to a degree by joining us in Year Two or Year Three of a course. This process is known as ‘advanced entry’, you can apply directly to the University for 'advanced entry' using the application forms provided above.
International admissions
International applicants can apply to us directly. If the University has an in-country team in your region, your application will be assigned to them for assistance.
Life at USW
Halls are a big part of your student experience and there’s accommodation at all three of our locations. If you don’t want to live near the campus, there are great transport links to keep you connected.
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